Romney Lies About Outsourcing At Bain. He Said They Didn't Outsource During His Tenure At Bain, He Lies Again.

How Mitt Romney Got Rich Destroying American Jobs and Promoting Sweatshop Capitalism

Romney-style capitalism means misery for working people and big money for the 1 percent.

August 1, 2012  |  

US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney

Right now, a man whose predatory career has claimed the jobs of countless Americans is trying to wrap himself in the flag and call himself a “job creator” and “wealth creator.”

Does he mean miserable jobs in Chinese factories? Wealth for the 1 percent? Apparently that’s exactly what he means.

Republicans claim that Mitt Romney's entrepreneurial activities at Bain Capital have been good for Americans. The truth is that Romney has spent his career offshoring and outsourcing American production processes -- and associated jobs -- to countries like China where human labor is valued in the market at a very low wage rate.

Mitt Romney’s tenure as Bain’s CEO has long linked him to offshoring and outsourcing. Even today, although he is no longer in that position, Romney still makes a nice profit on undertakings done long after he left the day-to-day management of the firm.

The usual justifying claim is that offshoring and outsourcing are methods where the American entrepreneur finds the lowest labor cost of production for specific goods and services. Conservatives argue that even if there are additional shipping costs, the entrepreneur can provide goods and services at a lower price to American markets than if the product were produced at home. According to this line of thinking, American consumers are said to be winners because they can buy more for each of their dollars of income. (Never mind that those folks whose jobs were shipped overseas will not have much income to buy much of anything.)

In reality, there is nothing just in such practices. They run counter to American values and are detrimental to a decent society.

Bain’s engagement in outsourcing under Romney’s leadership can be traced back to at least 1993, when the firm bought into a company called Corporate Software Inc. CSI provided a range of services for hi-tech companies such as Microsoft. One service you’ll be familiar with if you have ever had a computer glitch is the outsourcing of customer support, often through call centers. At first, CSI employed U.S. workers to provide these services, but by the mid-1990s CSI was establishing call centers in other countries.

Then CSI merged with another enterprise to form Stream International Inc. Stream immediately became active in the growing field of overseas calls centers. According to SEC reports filings, Bain was active in running Stream, providing “general executive and management services.”
Bain has gone on with a host of additional offshoring activities since Romney left day-to-day operations. Romney’s enormous wealth is partly derived from a golden handshake package he received when he left the management, which included a share of profits.